Although it is recommended that divs be used for page layouts there may be situations when tables still remain in use for complex layouts. They may be used solely on a Web page or they may coexist with layers and appear nested within them. Layers load and appear on a Web page much quicker than tables, which tend to be nested at greater levels than layers, and carry more overhead in terms of the markup and properties that comprise them. Layers load and appear progressively within a Web page during loading whereas tables appear only when the Web page has completed loading. Below is an example of a fixed-width Web page layout using left, center and right regions, which form a standard template using div layers. It is important to understand that the float: left and float: right CSS properties align layers either left or right relative to another layer. The property clear: both will clear the relative alignment and begin alignment of the next layer at an offset immediately below the previous relative layer of the greatest height. The absolute pixel width of the layout could be substituted for the relative width of 100% in the example below, since this is a fixed-width layout. The properties text-align: center and align: center align the text and entire containing layer, respectively.

The example below depicts the explanation above for creating a fixed-width Web page layout using div layers only. Tables and other elements may be contained in any of the template layers. Text paragraphs have been placed inside each layer for the sake of simplicity. Note that the layout is vertically dynamic, but horizontally static.